you wanted me to see your gods but i am afraid of heights;
i wanted you to touch mine but you cannot swim

you washed your hair in salt by the shore, smiling
with your cracked-skin lips like a perfect line of stitches

holding my head in your wet wet hands,
and i hadn’t heart to tell you that to me you smelt like death

but i suppose you thought the same of i—
like seaweed in the sun, sand in all my joints; breathless

“i’ll get my sea legs some day,” you said,
sealed beneath a new spring moon

and i just, just hadn’t heart to tell you
how these things always tend to end

1: when i dream about you, i cannot see your face. you are made of light and glass, all your colour cast through a filter, like i could dissect the uncanny reality of your existence the same way i could the blueness of the ocean waters, or the gold of the sun; you have no breath, and your fingers are bent in all the wrong places, but you smell of cat's fur and you're warmer than summer air.

2: it always manages to creep up on me, even now. i'll be picking at the burn marks on my thigh and i'll start to wonder about the wine in your cellar; i'll find myself teary-eyed in the chalky grip of morning and i won't know why, so i'll simply suppose it's you again, coming round my room in the middle of the night, putting your hands on everything, dreaming the prints will poison me. i wish just the once i'd wake up.

3: so what if i miss you? haven't you ever cried for the demolition of a slaughterhouse?

4: well, it's just—i don't know who'll spill my blood now.

hey, wake up.
there’s that girl at the door for you again:
this time she’s got you a little cardboard box
full of withered browning poppies
straight from her garden;
rain-stained and trembling,
she’s got on the sourest of smiles.
she’s crowding your room with remains,
she’s teaching you self-preservation,
she loves you.

today, she’s knocking on your door
with the impatience of a devil;
yesterday, she’s holding your hand,
rolling the pads of her fingers
over every bump of your knuckles
complimenting your bone structure.
“when you die, give your body to science,”
she says, and you know that she means
‘give it to me’—you have already said yes
quite some time ago now.

today, you’re waking up,
you’re wondering the time,
you’re opening the door,
you’re saying hello i missed you.
it’s been fifteen hours.
you’re eating your heart out
and feeding her the scraps.
tomorrow, you're picking meat
from her teeth, just one little bird
that can't believe its luck.

she invites herself in, and you see
with a little stumbling delight
that she’s wearing those gloves you like,
oh, that soft old berry-red pair—
the ones that smell of ash and ink,
used matches and newspaper-print.
she peels them off her hands,
presses them into yours, and,
entirely shameless,
you grip them tight.

you savour their warmth,
you savour their feel.
you consider residual skin cells.
you consider honest infatuation.
neither of them seem to you
to be the truth and nothing but,
not quite, not wholly.
you love anatomy, you love her.
save the both of you some trouble
and don’t bother trying to choose.

she’s sitting on the edge of your bed
and she smells like old perfume
that wants to tell you it smells
like a summer day;
she’s kicking off her shoes,
she’s talking about cutting your hair:
where do you keep the scissors?
she’ll say she wants to paint your nails, too
but really she just wants to think
about tearing them out.

it’s hard to know but you think
you might want that too.
everything’s so complicated—
you just want to be beside her
so that’s where you are! now
she’s ******* crisp shrunken petals
right into your mouth. is she?
she’s got her nails on your lips either way.
you’re tasting nature at its end.
you’re just waiting to join it.

hey, wake up.

here’s the story of how i remember you all wrong:
i’m on the number eleven bus, top deck,
and the hair of the boy right in front
is making me think of your own
—although when i try to recall
how you kept yours
i can’t.
i can’t think of the colour of your eyes
or the length of your fingers,
but i can think of how your arm looked
after you sliced it up to bleeding
that one time,
and i do,
i think til it hurts.
(i used to want to hurt you because
i liked you; now i only want to because i don’t.
but you know i don’t want to give you the wrong idea—)

(here’s the story where you didn’t hurt me:
—the wrong head, the wrong heart,
the wrong number under my name in your phone,
the wrong sound of a nervous little brought-in breath
coming between my teeth
as i roll my fingers over your knuckles,
the wrong airport in the wrong city,
the wrong voice for the first time i say
‘i love you’
to you without a single stumble,
or all the wrong questions to ask.
don’t you?)

and here’s the story of how i miss you all wrong:
i go home and curl up under the bedsheets in the dark
til i forget the precise colour of my eyes
and the exact shape of my hands, too,
and i guess that’s how i win,
just the once.

in our garden, i am growing
a new universe: one fresh
and clean and golden-sweet;
a world of milk over water
and honey over blood.

it’s not that i am unhappy
here with you! it was never that.
i’m just sick of these old stars,
and this ill-fit skin. so today
i am watching the bluebells bloom
and the ivy unfurl—cutting my hair short
and dreaming of a hundred new eyes,
skin that smells of summer.

this evening i cannot see the sky,
i cannot feel your gentle hands,
i cannot believe all your ghost stories
of a better world, a kinder world:
the impossibility of tomorrow
where everything is fine.

but all the same i will thank you.
i will tell you i love you, and
together then we will go to bed
and as you sleep i will watch
matter begin to seep and spill
through every ceiling crack,
and the sun start to rise,
firework-red,
over a sea of stars.

i am growing a new universe.

1
with each passing day you only grow yet more sickened by your every birth rite; keep your loathing for your *** and your name in a glass full of soil on your bedroom windowsill where the light will bring life before your societally imposed sense of shame can strike it down. you belong in a textbook of the future, a born-astronaut’s biology class.

2
here is somebody else’s name; here is your voice, with the texture of a nimbus cloud; here are your eyes coloured all blue, but a sickly sort, blue like a vein, blue like the wrong side of the sky, and the wrong shape of skull.

3
by the time you wake up, the world has already determined who you are going to be today. randomised generation: you are, you are a girl, you are doe-eyed, you are bitter, you are sweet, you are a puzzle to be solved, a shell to be broken, a wrong to be put right, you are pity’s cygnet under the wing of the mother bird, you are beautiful. you are beautiful. but you want to be ugly.

4
you want to be a blank slate.